Home Works 2

The second edition of the Home Works Forum, which took place in 2003, asked questions about the promise of globalization. Has it achieved its goal of creating a larger effective civil society or has it failed and resulted in alienation and loss of individuality amidst rapidly changing systems?

On a logistical level, the Home Works Forum is in a constant state of excavation and construction. The first edition of the Home Works Forum opened in early April 2002 and coincided with the outbreak of the second intifada in Palestine. The second edition of the Home Works Forum opened in late October 2003, after a six-month delay due to the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003. The third edition of the Home Works Forum is taking place in mid November 2005, again after a six-month delay due to the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. At this point, the Home Works Forum has (we think) settled into a regular schedule of regular disruption. This unpredictable dynamic has become a rhythm, a paradoxical routine. Because the practical and political circumstances around our work are always breaking and shifting, relevant questions about dislocation and disruption have imposed themselves repeatedly. From the experience of organizing three editions of the Home Works Forum, it is no longer self-evident for us to assume that such a platform makes true dialogue and cultural exchange possible. What the Home Works Forum allows for, rather, is a productive space in which political, social, economic, and cultural realities can be explored, reflected, and made manifest as visual and verbal articulations that occur with some consistency. These articulations have become our obsession.

Christine Tohme, 2005 Excerpt from the Introduction, Home Works II Publication (published in 2005, presented at the Home Works III Forum)